h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Interesting to hear. On the one hand it's a shame you needed six jobs to get around financially, on the other hand, experience is invaluable.

Sometimes odd jobs can get you "real" jobs. My wife was doing an unpaid internship with a musical/theatre teacher for her studies to become a primary school teacher. Then the musical teacher quit and proposed she'd take the job. She now is a paid musical teacher for over 120 kids in three locations.

I have only done half a year of odd jobs between two studies. Those jobs showed me why I should go and get a degree. Not in any particular order:
-Making pallets to size (until I ran out of wood and they needed another size. As in, I worked too fast. This was the only company where no questions were asked by any of the employment agencies if they fired you)
-Stacking boxes of gingerbread at the end of the production line (there are worse smelling things to stack).
-Making concrete lawn ornaments (half a day of pouring concrete in latex moulds, next morning peel off moulds and start over. A lot of heavy lifting and grazed knuckes).
-Painting decor for conference stands.
-Putting plants in pots (Two pots every 5 seconds).
-Operating an infernal machine that made cardboard profiles out of waste material from the drinks package industry (Hot!).
-Mounting and dismounting pieces of metal from a conveyor in a powder coating shop.
-Moved an office (The fun part was when we found out how many boxes were marked "Archive" and how big the actual archive room in the new office building was. After the archive room was stacked floor to ceiling, we continued in the hallway and then around the corner).
-Masked a prototype headlight lens before spray painting the reflective coating (turned out to be for the not yet released Porsche Boxster).
-Picking orders in a large warehouse for a swimming pool supplier (probably the least mind-numbing full job to do).
-Packing chemicals from large containers to smaller containers for the same swimming pool supplier (I can now imagine how Darth Vader must have felt in that mask and suit).

I did learn a lot about Health and Safety rules and how companies look at those. Some were very good, others... not so good.

Wow, yes - you could probably have written a whole book on what we call OSHA violations.

I couldn't help imagining that archive - and somebody looking at it and trying to figure out where to start...

I've been there with 'working too fast'. I've had temp jobs where the regular people warned me to slow down.

The regular people who didn't get fired weren't the ones I would hire if I owned a business. On the other hand, these were the people who could apparently tolerate being in the same room as the aluminium profile cutter without hearing protection. (I did have hearing protection because I was shooting three inch nails into wood with an air gun and I still thought the aluminium cutter made too much noise for my taste).

I know about OSHA. I work for an American owned company.

As someone with lifelong tinnitis, I would seriously recommend ear protection for everyone! Why do that to yourselves if you can help it?

"On the one hand it's a shame you needed six jobs to get around financially, on the other hand, experience is invaluable." - I second that.

My odd jobs were almost always unpaid, too A87941857 but thankfully did give me the experience I needed to get paid jobs eventually

I have been lucky to get a couple of paid odd jobs that were very enjoyable - at uni I supplemented my stipend by working as a mentor for disabled students for a few hours a week, and during the two years I was unemployed after finishing uni I was a marker for school maths exams twice a year